In an interview, Google engineering chief Ray Kurzweil discussed a new type of search engine that he is developing, noting that search engines will have increasingly human-like problem-solving capabilities in the years to come.

Kurzweil says future search engines will be able to understand documents, answer complex questions, and watch for new information that could be helpful to users. “Google has already taken steps toward actually understanding the meaning and it can read with a little bit of understanding.

That’s basically what I’m working on, to actually understand the content of the Web pages,” Kurzweil says. “You can ask it more complex questions that might be a whole paragraph…it might engage in a dialogue with you to find out what you need.”

Furthermore, he says people could assign research projects to a search engine, which would continuously scan for relevant information. Search engine advances will be noticeable within five to eight years, and human-like search abilities will emerge by 2029, when the Singularity between human and artificial intelligence occurs, Kurzweil says.